Tag: fiction

Writing

Perils, Pitfalls and Pleasures of Writing Memoir

Chrys Buckley

Writing about your own life is like walking through murky water. On one hand, you are employing some of the techniques of fiction. Dialogue. Description. Setting. Character Development. Theme. Symbolism. Story arc and plot. Scene, scene, scene. Internal monologue. All of these come into play. And then there are the smaller, detail-oriented things like cadence, sentence variation, and playing with language in an artful way that expresses what you want to say.

And yet, it’s not fiction.  There are limits on all of the above elements (except perhaps the language and sentence levels). Your dialog has to match, more or less, the dialogue as you remember it from real life. Your character development is limited to how much you’ve developed your insights and observations about the people around you, how closely and in how many dimensions you’ve paid attention.

Your story arc often won’t fit the more linear traditional arc. That can be one of the trickier things to work with. I think you do need a fair amount of crafting to make the raw material of your life into a story worth telling. You can’t just vomit out exactly as you remember it happening because life is so messy that your story would end up that way too. At the same time, I think it’s dangerous to control the messiness too much, to work too hard to fit things into and expected and accepted story arc. Doing so can push you too far into fiction. There has to be a balance between free-flowing creative energy and craft. And the more you write, the more both come naturally.

More on writing memoir

Metaphysics, Samples, Writing

The Colors – Dark As Roses 1

Chrys Buckley

I look around the classroom and try not to see anyone. I should pay attention to the psychology book on my desk—after all, the midterm is on Friday and it’s now Monday—but the words blur and swim on the page. At the board, Dr. Crowley goes on, reviewing the abnormal cases. Pretty soon he’ll bring up synesthesia and I’ll melt into a puddle of mush on the floor and die. In the meantime, I suppose I’ll stare at the wall. I can’t look at my classmates, I’ll only see the colors. Won’t even be able to see the faces for all the haze brought on by midterm worry. I’m going mad, I know.

Dark Rose

I’ve always seen the colors around the people, even as a very small child. Most of the shrinks my mom dragged me to back then chalked it up to synesthesia, said there was some odd wiring in my brain that confused my senses and that’s why I saw colors. They always did remark though, that it’s a very focused case. Usually people with synesthesia hear sound when they see motion or associate colors with certain letters and numbers, whereas I only saw the colors on the people. My classmates used to tease me about being the crazy girl in town, after I made the grave mistake of talking about it. Frustrated teachers tried to educate them about my affliction, as they called it, about the wiring gone wrong in my brain. That only made them laugh until they were sick with giggles. They called me “Metalbrain.”

Now it’s my second year away at college and no one knows about my problem. I don’t want Dr. Crowley talking about my affliction in the class. I might concentrate too hard on the professor, or the floor, or this wall I’m staring at. I might nervously twirl my hair or fidget and then everyone will know my secret.

~~~

Today I decided to go with some fiction. “Dark As Roses” is a short story I wrote about a girl who struggles with psychic ability she’s not sure she wants to possess. These are the first few paragraphs.

You can check out other Friday Samples here. And don’t forget you can always check out Published and Older Works for more samples.

~Chrys

Next Excerpt: Psychedelic Strobe Lights – Dark As Roses 2

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Writing

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Chrys Buckley

For anyone who writes stories, makes music or does any sort of creative art, this has to be one of the most common questions you are asked, and one of the most common questions you want to ask others.

Dreaming

It’s a mysterious thing. I think so many people are curious about it, even people who themselves are involved in the creative arts, because it’s not always concrete and logical (those aspects do come into play, of course). Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where that first seed or flash or image or idea originated.

Sometimes you know. The idea for Total Eclipse of the Heart, which I wrote originally as a short story and am now having fun working into a screenplay, came to me pretty much fully-formed in a dream, including some of the dialogue. Actually in the dream I was taking a screenwriting class (which at that point in time I had never done in real life) and struggling with writers block, then came up with this idea for the story and in the dream I was reworking it and molding it. There were so many details, so many subplots and so much complexity for a story that came from a dream.

That has never happened before or since but it was pretty cool when it did. It kinda made me feel like I had to write the story.

Continue reading “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” →

Writing

My Artist Statement

Chrys Buckley

artiststatementimages(The artist statement is something I had to write for a grant I applied for. I railed against it, mainly by way of procrastination, but here’s how it eventually, perhaps a bit too passionately, came out.)

ARTIST STATEMENT

Like most people I know, my childhood was regularly awful. I am albino, which means that my skin, hair and eyes are paler than pale and I’m legally blind. This condition complicated social matters, but with a messy home life, I often felt more different and alienated on the inside than I was in outward appearance. I survived my difficult times by reading books. Books entertained and deepened me. Reading took me to other worlds, which paradoxically helped me understand my own life and illuminated what it meant to be human in a more universal way.

Continue reading “My Artist Statement” →

Blindness and Disability, Metaphysics, Writing

Just Introducing Myself

Chrys Buckley

photo-4 newI’m a writer currently living on Orcas Island. I do fiction, poetry, essay, memoir and more. I also do freelance copy-editing and writing coaching, so if you’re interested in either, feel free to contact me for details.

I have a booth at the local Saturday Market where I have stories, memoir chapters and poetry for sale in little chapbooks, as well as CDs of a live performance I did last summer where I read writing pieces to an audience to raise money to get to a writing retreat at Esalen put on by The Sun magazine. Again, if interested in any of the above, contact me and I’ll hook you up.

My main jaunt at the Market booth is tarot reading. I use the Aleister Crowley Thoth deck for card readings of spreads ranging from one card to fifteen cards, with tons in between that address all sorts of specific or general issues. I offer over-the-phone and in-person readings by appointment, and incorporate astrology and numerology into longer appointment readings.

My current project and biggest time consumption is a memoir about my college years and the “school of life.” It’s titled Learning to Swim and I’ll probably post pieces of it here at this site. I have albinism, a genetic condition that affects 1 in 17,000 Americans. For those who aren’t familiar with it, albinism results in little or no pigment, and greatly reduced visual acuity (often legal blindness). I think I have an interesting story to tell as a girl growing up in America with a disability and looking different, and experiencing the world in all its anguish and beauty in a very deep way. I want to hold up the experiences to the light and let the reader peer at them very closely, the way I peer closely at everything.

Of the first major draft of the project, my first reader says:

“This is a book about vision (literally and metaphorically), about extreme courage, seeking to make your way and not settling for less, with a musical soundtrack that serves as its own journey providing clarity and perception along the way.” ~Stargazer

~Chrys

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